Culture June 21, 2013

Beginning in the 1920s, an experimental literary modernism emerged in the small journals and tertulias of the major cities of Spanish America that would come to be known as the vanguardia. Its practitioners, mostly the sons of emergent bourgeoisies, adopted the methods of European modernists and altered them to fit the distinctive historical circumstances of early-twentieth-century Latin America—a moment when the region was both compelled by the imperial whims of the United States and drawn increasingly into the circuits of global capitalism. Few fictions of the vanguardia reflect the upheavals of modernization with the poignancy of Martín Adan’s explosive and